


When did the silence become so loud?

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cats, Draco buys a cat, Ghost Harry Potter, Hallucinations, Harry Potter Dies, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Regret, Sadness, Sort Of, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-19 14:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18136703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Draco always drinks his morning tea with Harry, the only problem with that is Harry's dead.





	When did the silence become so loud?

Draco sipped his lemon tea and thought about the past. The kitchen was always quiet this early in the morning. His mother did not like to get up so early and have to face an even longer day of emptiness, and his father would be sitting silently in the library, staring blankly at the wall. So, Draco sipped his tea surrounded by silence. The tap dripped into the basin and every time he raised his mug the spoon clinked against the rim. Simple noises that echoed and made the silence somehow deafening. It was always quiet these days, but he’d never realised it was quite this suffocating like a fog had wrapped itself around his life, or that the world as he saw it, was swathed in a thick layer of cotton wool. 

He sipped his tea again and watched the cold light filter through the window. The kitchen looked out over the hills to the East and the sun was just starting to creep out. The dawn was never as dramatic as everyone believed, it was too tired to be beautiful. Instead, it was always washed out and hollow and cold. The dawn understood him like no one else ever could. It knew what it was like to wake and be tired, to feel empty for no reason at all, to have a colourless canvas at the very centre of its heart. One that would never to be painted, all because no one could stand to look at him, even less to approach him, and never ever to touch him. 

The dawn was also when Harry appeared. The first time, Draco had spilt his tea, splashed it over his hand, burning his thumb, because there was someone else in his kitchen. But now he just nodded to the pale figure. It was clearly Harry with that terrible hair and that awful smile. Harry preserved in all his perfection from the last moment he saw him, though his colours were no longer so bright like he was covered in ash, the burnt fragments of another life. Draco liked him being here, even if he wasn’t really. Even if all they did was smile at each other, like two people who see one another in a café but never talk. Harry just sipping his morning coffee and glancing up at Draco with that lop-sided smile. 

As lovely as it was though, not to be alone for breakfast, it was wrong. Wrong simply because Harry was dead. Harry had died saving the world. Draco had wondered for a long time whether Harry was a ghost but he figured if that were the case, Harry would not waste his time haunting someone like him. That meant though that it was his mind that invited Harry here, his mind that supplied that smile and that messy hair and those shaking hands that held his mug a little too tight. Draco would never complain though, he liked having Harry by his side, however faded he was. Liked having someone to smile at, someone to make him feel a little less lonely even though he was, very much alone. 

When they sit there alone together, the white kitchen walls stained grey with the morning sun, Draco says some of the things he wished he’d said earlier, back when Harry was alive to hear them. Some of the things in his heart that he wished he’d had the courage to say when they were at school, and all sorts of impossible things could have happened. Where they could have talked for hours whilst watching the moon, held hands in the corridor hoping people wouldn't see, or even, and barely dared to dream that it could have happened, they might have kissed on the stairways between classes and before bed. They could have been teenagers in love. But they weren't, and now, seeing Harry’s smiling face, he knew he shouldn’t have been scared. Harry had been many things, oblivious being the most obvious one, but he wasn’t cruel, he wouldn’t have been unkind even if his feelings weren’t reciprocated. He would have been surprised, would have blushed like a fool, probably even stuttered, but he wouldn’t have been unkind. So, Draco shouldn’t have been scared, but he had been. Scared of what he was, what he felt and what other people would think. So, he only had himself to blame that they had never had the opportunity to ever be anything. 

Even when his parents come down, and they all sat around the table, eating but not tasting, swallowing but not thinking, looking at each other, but seeing nothing, Harry sat with them. He sat and he smiled at Draco as if to reassure him that the world wasn’t as bad as it looked every morning. Draco always smiled back, at what everyone else saw as an empty chair, but to him, contained the wonderful thing in the world. He often wondered, sitting there between toast and tea, if Harry knew, because he was in his head. If he knew of all the times that Draco had thought of ending his own life while eating breakfast. Of drowning himself in the bath surrounded by his mother’s lavender candles, just so he wouldn’t have to see the people he loved reduced to nothing but ghosts, just so that he could give people what they wanted, because if he couldn’t bring Harry back, maybe his own death could be a consolation for other peoples’ loss. 

But he hadn’t done it yet, and he supposed that as long as Harry came to him, he probably wouldn’t ever, because Harry gave him hope. Harry gave him a reason to wake up in the morning, a reason to go downstairs and sit and watch the sunrise. Harry was the reason Draco was still alive, whether that was for better or for worse he didn’t know yet, but they’d be no way of finding out unless he stayed alive for a little bit longer. Harry was also the reason that Draco brought a cat. It had been his suggestion between sips of coffee. He said it would be less weird to talk to a cat. Draco hadn’t intended to actually buy one, but it had just sort of happened.

He named him Harry, and he always lay on the table as the sun rose, rolling onto his back, paws covering his face under the golden glow. This new Harry was as beautiful as the last one, dark fur and green eyes and a constant look of distraction. This new Harry gave him another reason to wake up in the morning, another reason to go downstairs and watch the sunrise. Somehow it was brighter than before, filled the room with a rosy light, pink and yellow reflecting off the walls and warming every inch of him. Harry’s purr was a lion’s roar against the demons that lurked in the silence, scaring them back to wherever they came from. For the first time then, Draco was content to just sit and watch the sun, one hand nestled in Harry’s fur, the other holding his lemon tea, and for the first time thinking about the future.

**Author's Note:**

> This has taught me I probably shouldn't write when I'm sleep deprived. Sorry.


End file.
